By Jill Chase 

Here’s a little secret: not all plants are good guys. Some are very bad actors indeed. It’s not their fault; they were good plants minding their own business, growing in their own native habitat, until someone introduced them to our homeland. Here, with a climate that suited them and no native insects or animals to eat them, they grew with wild abandon. Meeting little resistance, they spread quickly, stomping out any native plant in their way. 

Now firmly rooted in their adopted land, they devise creative ways to spread their seed—they leaf out early, shading out native seedlings, and some even use chemical warfare in the form of toxins in their roots that kill the competition. These are invasive plants. It may sound like a trailer for a monster movie, but it’s real and it’s right outside your door.

Invasives are a significant problem on many fronts. The economic cost of invasive species in North America is $26 billion per year (some sources say more). Crops and livestock as well as commercially significant fish are all in jeopardy. Some invasive species out West contribute to wildfires, while others attack from the water, clogging up water treatment facilities and recreation areas.

Some might argue that the environmental cost is even greater. Native species have co-evolved to form a food web of interdependence in which the invasive species play no part. For example, they provide little or no food for caterpillars that make up most of native birds’ diets during nesting season. Scientists say 30 percent of native songbirds have already been lost due to this and other environmental factors. In some places, invasive vines march through native woods like Godzilla stomps on Tokyo. 

But all is not lost. Individuals can do a lot to fight invasives. As 94 percent of Connecticut is in the hands of private owners, and the majority of these foreign invader plants are on individual house lots, a real impact can be made by removing them and resetting the local natural balance. It is still possible, together, to change the ending of this scary story.